Many manufacturers use large amounts of drilling and/or metalworking fluids in their manufacturing operations. Many of these fluids have been found to be noxious or potentially hazardous to workers in these environments. Additionally, some of the fluids or ingredients therein can be damaging to hydraulic seals and the like used in the manufacturing operations.
Additionally, it is common practice and knowledge that the metalworking fluids used in the past have limited life. Typically, the fluids would require disposal due to contaminants and reductions in useful metalworking properties. Therefore, a production line would experience down time during changes of fluids. This resulted in loss of efficiencies and lost revenue due to the down time. Additionally, storage, replacement and disposal of the metalworking fluids is extremely costly, particularly in a large scale manufacturing environment.
Common manufacturing operations are conducted for a predetermined period of time using conventional drilling and/or metalworking fluids. The fluids must be sampled after some time to determine specific properties of the fluid property characteristics in order to determine the additions that need to be made to bring the fluid up to predetermined operating specifications. Thereafter, various booster mixtures of predetermined constituents are prepared based on restoring the properties of the metalworking fluid, e.g., restoring defoamer, viscosity booster/reducer, rheology lubricity, water hardener, polymer foam control, ester phosphorous, etc. And finally, the booster(s) is/are added to the reservoir for restoring original properties to the metalworking fluid mixture and the manufacturing operation for a predetermined period of time.
Therefore, there exists a need in the art to provide longer lasting metalworking fluid systems that are more environmentally friendly, eliminate the need for boosters, provide metalworking benefits and do not require costly down time for boosting, changing and disposal of used fluids.